Like its subjects, exhibit makes its mark

Artists' sketchbooks offer up much more than just the drawings inside

August 23, 2006|Globe Correspondent

An artist's sketchbook is like a diary. There plans hatch, dreams simmer, problems resolve, and the sights and issues of the day get recorded. ``Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks," a sweetly intimate and revealing show at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, invites the viewer into the scribblings and jottings of artists from the 17th century to the present.

Not many sketchbooks stay in one piece after they leave the artist's possession; single sheets get torn out and sold. ``Under Cover," curated by Miriam Stewart , features individual pages (she calls them ``orphans") as well as intact books. The books hold special allure: Every volume tells a story that a single page cannot, for one, and many of these books, carried around in their author's pockets and curving to their bodies, often stuffed with ephemera such as photographs and admission tickets, offer up more information than just the drawings inside.

Stewart has opened most books to a single page and put them under glass; they are too fragile to be flipped through by the public. But the museum staff has also created excellent facsimiles of sketchbooks by a few artists to provide the hands-on excitement of poring through pages of doodles and drawings by artists from Jacques-Louis David to George Grosz .

The earliest works are, remarkably, some of the best preserved, since they were made on acid-free paper. The Dutch painter Jan Josefsz van Goyen's drawings from around 1650 -- studies of a cow and of a landscape -- lay bare the artist's loose-limbed lines, which may not be the first things you see in his landscape paintings (dramatic skies were more his stock in trade), but they're there if you look for them.

David's ``Pauline Bonaparte, the Princess Borghese" (1805- 0 6) anticipates his epic mural ``The Coronation of Napoleon I." David attended the coronation, notebook in hand, and then spent several years re-creating it in paint. Here he sketches Napoleon's sister, regal in her empire-waist dress; her train trails onto the opposite page.

Stewart organized the show thematically, so David's pages appear near other figure studies, such as Paul Cezanne's ``Portrait of a Man" (1882-83). The drawing spells out the artist's compositional process as he maps forms: the drooping, egg-shaped head of a sleeping man, the cylinder of the chair arm behind him.